To quote the quote given in the commit: "As an IBM employee, you are not allowed to use your gmail account to work in any way on VNIC. You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby". You are an IBM employee 100% of the time. Please remove yourself completely from the maintainers file. I grant you a 1 time exception on contributions to VNIC to make this change."

Your interpretation is not obvious to me at all. To me that reads that the person was using is private address to work on the kernel as a hobby and IBM objected because he is considered to 100% at IBM. My interpretation of this is of the typical corporate overreach were they claim everything you do is theirs.

As I interpret it, it's not even that. The instruction is to remove his personal email from the MAINTAINERS file, not to halt work on the project. Now, maybe that was said offline, we certainly have no evidence. But the most obvious interpretation is that Lijun Pan was employed by IBM to work on the Linux kernel driver for this piece of IBM hardware, and IBM (unsurprisingly) wants all contributions credited to them and not to individuals. Most employers would have similar rules if you ask them. Certainly mine wouldn't want me using my personal address for stuff they paid me to do.

Is the way this was done maybe a bit hidebound, corporate and uncharitable? Yeah. It's IBM, duh. But absent other evidence it doesn't seem like this devleoper is being pulled off a project for using a personal email.

Yeah, it appears to overlap with their day to day work: https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20200814075921.88745-5-ljp@li...

In the current employment environment where employers do assert rights over the output of employees, it's not that strange that the employer would instruct the employee to not muddy the context of the contributions.

This is reasonably separable from whether this is a good way to organize things as a society.

Any sort of administrative action or warning should not have to be interpreted. If that is the case, the warning should have been explicit that they are not allowed to contribute in any way because of said contracts. Instead, there's hand-wavy complaints about a "hobby" and very aggressive and cultish, "You are an IBM employee 100% of the time".

Makes sense, but:

"Hey John, there are legal reasons preventing us from working on VNIC even in an unofficial capacity as IBM employees. I've attached a document outlining the company position as background. Let's chat more about this on Thursday in our 1:1."

Sounds like a reasonable interpretation. The phrasing of the message that the developer claims to have received is still concerning even keeping that in mind.